I don't even care if somebody is currently in prison; I think every prison needs a polling place and facilities for on-site journalists/reporters who are covering what is going on inside.
If your elections could be significantly moved by the votes of prisoners, you live in a failed state.
Locations of prisons tend to be rural and have very different demographics from the places where prisoners would otherwise be living.
Deciding to let prisoners vote needs to be followed up by a decision on whether to let them vote as if they returned to their former home, or in the location of the prison.
Their vote should be able to impact the conditions of the prison
But another way to look at it, is that by being counted as part of the population in the vicinity of the prison, it provides an incentive to have prisons and to incarcerate people, and it also reduces the representation of the places prisoners come from.
The prisoners make up about 0.5% of the population of the US. That's bigger than the margins we saw in several swing states in the last few elections.
I'd agree to that if we add a "No Acceptable Candidate" option, and if it gets the majority of the vote the parties are forced to present new candidates and try again.
So you're saying it's true that there's no objective truth?
How is this enforced?
So if you are registered, then wherever you live, you'll bein a giant book. When you show up to vote, you just tell them your name and they draw a line through it. If you're out of your district, you can still vote. You just need to fill out an absentee voting form wherever you go to. This information is collated after the fact for failures to appear or duplicates.
I believe if you fail to appear you just get mailed a fine that starts at $20 [2]. I'm not sure this enforcement is 100%. At least, I've never known anyone who has gotten one. Then again, not voting seems to be relatively uncommon.
Voting, in my experience, is straightforward and quick. It's never taken me more than 5-10 minutes. The polling places are typically schools (which you can use, because it's on a Saturday) and I've never had to wait for more than a few minutes.
But this is why mandatory appearance is so important: the AEC is then responsible for making sure there is sufficient capacity. They can't play games with making it harder or easier in particular districts. Mandatory appearance frees the AEC from any partisan traps of that particular type.
[1]: https://www.aec.gov.au/enrolling_to_vote/enrolment_stats/
[2]: https://www.elections.wa.gov.au/vote/failure-vote#:~:text=Th....
"It is not the case, as some people have claimed, that it is only compulsory to attend the polling place and have your name marked off, and this has been upheld by a number of legal decisions:
"High Court 1926 – Judd v McKeon (1926) 38 CLR 380
Supreme Court of Victoria 1970 – Lubcke v Little [1970] VR 807
High Court 1971 – Faderson v Bridger (1971) 126 CLR 271
Supreme Court of Queensland 1974 – Krosch v Springbell; ex parte
Krosch [1974] QdR 107
ACT Supreme Court 1981 – O'Brien v Warden (1981) 37 ACTR 13"
https://www.aec.gov.au/About_AEC/Publications/voting/
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On Australia's ranked choice implementation:
Some people (including me) see Australia's system as the forcing of an appearance of consent for the election of the same two parties. Within that system, you're not only not allowed to find all of the candidates unacceptable (and/or not to care about the outcome), but even further you're forced to rank all of the candidates. Albert Langer tried to get people to rank both major parties equally last, rather than accepting being forced to show a preference between them, and was jailed.
"During his incarceration, Albert Langer was deemed by Amnesty International to be a 'Prisoner of Conscience.'"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Langer
Australia managed to create a system even worse than FPTP. It annihilates small parties, and with their aggressive defense of it, this is obviously an intended effect. I think they just need proper runoffs if they honestly want to record people's preferences. At the absolute least, allow people to abstain from endorsing every candidate (but one, practically speaking.) Instead, millions of people who despise both the Labor and Liberal candidates have their votes recorded for one or the other every single election, under pain of fine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langer_vote
Australian-style ranked choice reduces to almost exactly what we have now, but additionally artificially inflates the support of status quo incumbents.
That's wrong. If the election is on November 2nd that is an objective fact.
Facts can be opinions instead.
[1] https://insiderpaper.com/facebook-court-filing-fact-checks-a...
This one is easy. There is no integrity of facts. No matter what standard you use you will have cases where reasonable people disagree. Historians argue about interpretation of facts all the time. There is no universal objective truth.
You can argue that you don't need absolute integrity and just clamp down on the fringe stuff but that just shifts the problem. You will find a boundary where reasonable people disagree about action being needed.
Election integrity actually has more to do with politicizing the elections process, which is so incredibly dangerous. The whole "ends justify the means" is a symptom of a siege mentality, which is deliberately created by those who personally benefit from it.
So what could the US do? Three things:
1. State independent commissions to run elections, draw boundaries around Congressional districts and certify elections. This should not be done by the legislature;
2. Move voting to Saturday and Sunday;
3. Make appearing at a polling place mandatory. This one is controversial. This is the system Australia has. You don't have to vote. You simply need to show up and get your name crossed off. That's it; and
4. Preferential or ranked choice voting.
Optional voting is nothing more than a tool for voter suppression. Stripping citizens of voting rights, (historically) tests on literacy to be able to vote, some districts requiring you to queue for hours to vote and so on are all designed to suppress the vote.
I don't care if someone was a felon or you think they're not informed enough (who decided that?). The absolute death of democracies is where a small minority dictates what happens to the rest of the country and that's where the US is hdeaded.
The tech giants have very little to do with that.